There is little of more importance in a democracy than that each qualified voter who appears at the polls on an Election Day will be able to vote --- and that this vote will be recorded and counted accurately.

Many states, including Florida, are switching from paper ballots to high-tech, ATM-like electronic voting machines. With the increasing use of the new machines, there is mounting evidence suggesting that touch-screen machines present a far graver threat to the integrity of America's elections.

We urge state lawmakers to consider two election reform bills that require a paper trail of all votes. Repeated studies have shown that touch-screen machines, which provide voters with no paper record of their ballots, are highly susceptible to tampering.

That, and links to other notable voting news stories from over the weekend, linked below...

**"Daily Voting News" is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in "Daily Voting News" may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**

No, the problem with DRE's, what people think of as "touchscreens", is that the thing that such a device counts is not a ballot that a human can verify, but an electronic representation that actually says... who knows what?

The human is then handed a paper printout, but that's an after-the-fact product of the DRE, not the thing that the DRE actually counts. And the human cannot verify that what the printout says the DRE did is actually what the DRE did.

This is one of the fatal flaws of e-voting.

As for Dredd's current orgasms over the "source code" section... when will Dredd urge that the bills language be modified to properly account for third-party code in the machine? Because if the language is not modified then the bills ask for the impossible.

And how would Dredd resolve that conflict without creating a double standard for code exposure?

I ask this not for some open source EVM project of the future, but for these bills... which are scheduled to take affect immediately and affect the 2008 election.

If HR 811 and S 559 were left as is, after the conference committee morphs them into one bill, it would vastly improve the current state of affairs. And if some improvements are made by amendments that would be all the more ... great!

But to demand immediate perfection in the place of good progress can doom any bill.

Bills are like babies, not a perfect and competent adult at first introduction.

But if progress is attained thruout its life, the end result is acceptable.

For those who confuse an "orgasm" with posts on blogs, I have some advice for morphing a zapkitty into a purrpussy: try progressive sex ... like bills should be tried ... constant improvement. The first one is not the best except to those who never improve.

A progressive is one who believes that over time things can become progressively better ... so that the final one can be better than the original one.

But it ain't progress, Dredd, if true reforms like actually counting the paper ballots, full disclosure of all code running in the machines, and forbidding internet access in tabulators is not in the bill, and this is made worse when those flaws show either gnorance of the subject at hand or are deliberately obscured by creative use of language.

But when this lack of real progress and effective safeguards is accompanied by unreasonable permament damage to the system, permament as in making the disaster that is the EAC permament.... then it's time to say "STOP!" and ask the authors what the hell they think they are doing.

And when they have no good explanations... and so far they've come up either severely lacking or downright silent in that department... well, that tells you all you need to know, right?